01763cam a2200229 4500 214758698 TxAuBib 20101214120000.0 050208s2005||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 9780375501845 0375501843 TxAuBib Russell, Mary Davis. A thread of grace : a novel / Mary Davis Russell. New York : Random House, 2005. 430 pages ; 23 cm. It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive. Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war’s final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell’s many fans and earn her even more. 20050208. World War, 1939-1945 Italy Fiction. Italy History Fiction. Historical fiction.